There had been a blizzard a few nights ago, and while the roads were plowed, they were still slick. His car wasn’t meant for joy riding in the snow, and he didn’t have four-wheel drive, but he headed north anyway.
He took a detour up the mountain, and followed a bumpy country road to the McCullough acreage—McCullough Mountain. Stale resentment boiled back to life as he recalled how much he envied the big family. Erin had been closer to them. She even dated Finn for a while, but Harrison supposed that hadn’t worked out. Pity, because it would have been nice to see his sister with a good family like the McCulloughs.
Navigating his way up the pockmarked thoroughfare, he steered clear of any mud or icy patches. Once again, the familiar roads appeared smaller than he remembered.
He’d read somewhere that Luke McCullough never made it pro, which pissed him off. Luke got the scholarship that should have been Harrison’s ticket out of Jasper Falls. When his father learned there would be no free college ride, it had caused the fight that changed everything.
The road disappeared for a moment and all Harrison could see before him was his father’s blotchy complexion as he tried to choke the life out of him. He could still recall the pain of struggling to breathe and the fear that his father might actually kill him. No matter how many times he’d been hit, knowing his father could end him without flinching hurt most of all.
His tire rocked into a crater and his focus returned to the bumpy road.
“Shit.” He shouldn’t be this far up on the mountain. The roads were hardly plowed. He followed the divots other tires had left and looked for a place to turn around, driving back toward the suburban neighborhoods below.
He hadn’t waited around for graduation. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway with no scholarship or any place to go. Instead, he cut out early and ran, no high school diploma, barely any money, and no lifeline in case things went wrong, which they had in the beginning.
It was amazing the things people would do to survive. That had been his main goal, survival. He’d been desperate to make something of himself, determined to never return home again.
He’d sold just about every bodily fluid science would buy just to keep a warm roof over his head that first winter. By the following spring, he’d landed a job at a mechanic’s garage where he learned a thing or two about fixing cars. He’d come from such a sheltered background, he would have been content to continue living a blue-collar life, but one day, an old Bentley broke down by their shop and his life changed for the better.
Larry Dunbar—founder of Dunbar Associates, lover of classic cars, blacklisted from eighty percent of Nevada casinos, and a dangerous card shark only a fool would bet against, rolled into Harrison’s life on a flat tire, saw potential in him, and pulled him out of poverty in a black limo.
“You’re gonna make me money, kid. I know it in my gut,” he’d told him the day they drove into Manhattan.
Harrison knew the man had the power to change his life for the better, so he trusted him and learned as much as possible. At first, Dunbar treated him like a protégé, advising him on everything down to how to tip a waitress and what shoe laces to buy.
Over time, Harrison realized Dunbar didn’t work on Wall Street, Wall Street worked for him. He was a genius when it came to investment, and Harrison wanted to learn every possible thing he could teach him about success.
Dunbar was his father’s age, but he didn’t look like the older men he’d grown up around. His clothes were nicer, his skin less leathered, his eyes shone brighter, and his car was purchased for pleasure rather than functionality.
It was love at first sight. Not only did Harrison want to know his secrets, but he also wanted to live his life. He wanted to be Larry Dunbar.
That first trip into Manhattan stole his breath away. The towering sight of skyscrapers reminded him just how small and unworldly he was. For a moment, he was scared enough to return home, but then something changed. He saw kids his age bustling down the busy streets, fearless and focused on some destination, and Harrison swore he’d only look forward and never look back.
“The country’s for agriculture,” Dunbar once told him. “Things grow and die on farmland. The city is for steel. Everything strong goes into these buildings and they’re made to rise.”
Harrison wanted to rise. He wanted to reach the top and live in a penthouse like the gods, overlooking the rest of the world.
Within one year he’d earned enough money to buy and sell his childhood home. Why that number mattered, he wasn’t sure. He had no interest in purchasing the house. It haunted him for years, even after leaving Jasper Falls. But part of him needed such a measuring stick for his success, a sort of metric to prove he’d accumulated—in a short time—more than his father ever could.